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CARY, N.C., May 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As enterprising criminals propagate fraud schemes against the backdrop of the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic, digital identity authentication has perhaps never been more critical. Is that virtual credit applicant who they claim to be? Is the person trying to access that online account the real customer? Businesses have mere seconds for due diligence – and now they have the power of SAS® Identity: Enrichment and Assessment to differentiate stolen and synthetic identities from legitimate customers, in real time.

The first in SAS' identity analytics solutions line, SAS Identity: Enrichment and Assessment is a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, making it easy to deploy and scale. It delivers the strength of consortium authentication, vetting each digital encounter against diverse authentication data from a variety of leading digital, biometric, public and behavior data providers. Data is centralized and fed into robust SAS analytics and machine learning algorithms, layering methods to detect fraud more quickly and accurately.

"Regardless of what the fraud score says, you really need to know who you're doing business with. The first step for us was, how do we do that? How do we stop the bad actors at the front door with minimal intrusion to our good customers?" said Richard Cooney, Director of Fraud Strategy at Axcess Financial, which provides a range of financial products through its family of brands, including Check 'n Go and Allied Cash Advace.

As the industry overall saw application fraud triple over the last five years, Axcess Financial fought a growing number of charlatans and criminal networks masquerading as digital payday loan applicants. The lender's fraud detection system struggled to keep pace.

Already using SAS solutions for marketing optimization, credit risk and more, Axcess started using SAS Identity: Enrichment and Assessment. Cooney initiated what he called the "fraud evaluation phase" last fall, learning to differentiate first-party, third-party and synthetic fraud via the solution. By December, his team screened the first accounts in a full deployment. Axcess' early results were as impressive as they were swift.

"We slashed third-party fraud by at least 80% in just a couple of months. It was just that fast," said Cooney. "We also significantly reduced the number of denials caused by applicants who were unable to pass customer identification."

Moreover, Axcess' fraud operations team has dramatically shortened the time needed to investigate consumer identity fraud disputes, pared from hours to mere minutes per case.

"From the time the customer notifies us their identity was stolen, it typically takes less than five minutes to investigate the case," said Butterfield. "A manual process that previously took three to five hours, now done in just a few minutes about 85% of the time. All the data we used to authenticate and evaluate the customer when they opened the credit line is available to the agent during the investigation."

With immediate returns that exceeded Axcess' expectations, SAS is now deepening the platform's capabilities to include multifactor authentication, expanded biometric support and real-time Social Security Administration verifications.

"SAS has developed an industry-leading cloud service that brings speed and flexibility to help combat identity fraud in all its forms," said John Watkins, Global Lead for Identity and Digital Fraud Solutions at SAS. "We help streamline the integration and management of multiple identity data providers and deliver hybrid analytics to instantly detect known and emerging threats."

Watkins will demo SAS Identity: Enrichment and Assessment during the final installment of SAS Global Forum Virtual on Tuesday, June 16 – streaming live and on demand. Registration is complimentary.

In the meantime, to learn more about how SAS' identity analytics capabilities combine AI-driven data orchestration with on-demand decisions for real-time results, visit SAS identity and fraud analytics solutions online. Or take a deeper dive into the growing scourge of synthetic identities by downloading the white paper Detect and Prevent Identity Theft.

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